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Another excellent Azed with a twist. Omitted and added letters spell out: IT’S GOOD BUT LETTERS GET IN THE WRONG PLACES. The full quotation from Winnie the Pooh is:

“My spelling is Wobbly. It’s good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.”

Unfortunately, a line seems to have Wobbled its way out of the preamble, which could therefore have been misleading for anyone unfamiliar with this type of puzzle. It should have read something like: ‘Definitions in both across and down clues refer to untreated answers; subsidiary indications (such as anagrams) lead to treated forms as they appear in the diagram’.

BIOTOPES – O — BITES holding P= power. A biotope is a region uniform in its environmental conditions and its biota.

15

GOODWOOD -O — The race meeting is known as ‘glorious Goodwood’. Final letters of ‘camping abroad: New England’. I liked this clue.

16

SEA DOG -D — SOG = get soaked; EA = waterway. In this case, the waterway is in ‘to get soaked’.

17

AMIABLE -B — I taken in by A MALE.

19

OUTPUTTING -U — *(got); about (surrounding) PT = part; TIN = cash.

23

PEPPERPOT -T — PERP = a familiar term to those who read US crime fiction (for anyone who doesn’t, it’s short for ‘perpetrator’); in PEPO = a gourd. Pepperpot is West Indian dish of cassareep, flesh or dried fish, and vegetables, especially green okra and chillis.

25

RULELESS -L — RUES, housing ES = second-person singular of être — so ‘tu es’ is the local (French) form of ‘thou art’. It took me a whIle to work out the ES part of this.

GROSSNESS -S — GRONE is an obsolete form of ‘groan’. A beautifully concise clue.

35

AGENTS GENERAL -G — ERA; after ‘nest’ reversed; all in *(lane). An agent general is a representative in England of an Australian state or Canadian province.

Down

2

NEPIT +E — NET = difficulty; PIE = a book of rules for determining the Church office for the day. A nepit (also ‘nit’) is a unit of information equal to 1.44 bits.

3

NAGAPIE +T — NAGA = cobra, swallowing T; PIE can also mean ‘a welcome luxury, prize, or spoil’, among several other things. A nagapie is a bushbaby or nocturnal lemur.

4

EXPO +I — E = minimum of enthusiasm; *(i pox). I have mixed feelings about this clue — I like the deceptive surface reading given by the two meanings of showing; but I think using ‘in’ to get the I into it was not one of Azed’s more elegant efforts.

5

HISTIE +N — HINS = plural of ‘hin’, a Hebrew liquid measures, containing about four or six English quarts; TIE = unite. ‘Histie’, also spelt ‘hirstie’ is a Scots word meaning dry or barren.

6

ESDA +T — part of ‘broAD’S TEstimony’ reversed. ESDA is ‘electrostatic document analysis (or apparatus), a forensic test (or the equipment for this) used to reveal impressions on paper or evidence of amendments to documents’.

7

PLUM +H — ‘Phylum’ (which can mean ‘a group of languages thought to be related’); with Y = variable, omitted. Chambers gives us one of its definitions of ‘plum’ somewhat extravagantly as ‘something choice that may be extracted (sometimes in reminiscence of Jack Horner) or attained to, such as one of the best passages in a book, one of the prizes of a career, or a government office as a reward of services, etc.’ Isn’t copy-and-paste wonderful?

8

ORIGIN +E — I GIN (gin being a type of trap very familiar to crossword regulars); in ORE = a type of seaweed, also called ‘tangle’ (genus Laminaria).

9

HEELS +W — L = line; WEE = a short distance; in SH (= silence) reversed. ‘Heel’ can just about mean ‘lift’ — maybe in the sense of ‘tilt’?

DULIA +L — ‘DULL’= cheerless; AI (ideal) reversed. Dulia, in Roman Catholic theology, is ‘the inferior veneration accorded to saints and angels (as opposed to hyperdulia, that accorded to the Virgin Mary, and latria, that accorded to God alone)’. So now you know.

24

PYCNA +A — P = piano; YA = ‘ay’ reversed; *(can). Azed tells us that this classical plural form is not given in Chambers, which defines pycnon as ‘in ancient Greek music, that part of the tetrachord (chromatic or enharmonic) where the smallest intervals fall; in medieval music, a semitone’.

26

SPIT +C — S = special; on PICT = ancient Briton. Chambers tells us that ‘spit’ has been used as jocular term for ‘sword’.

AYRE +S — SAY = speak; RE = about. ‘Ayre’ is an old form of ‘air’ — a tune or song, in particular an Elizabethan or Jacobean song for solo voice..

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 9th, 2007 at 9:13 am and is filed under Azed.
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6 Responses to “Azed 1840: Give and take”

It looks as though there will be many similar clues this month, based on the most obvious anagram ( used by myself inter alia). Did anyone else think that there was a mistake, a clash, in square 23 yesterday?

I think there is definitely a clash there.
23D is a straightforward hidden word. However, if you’re using the printed version of Chambers, you’ll need to look it up under a different headword, as an alternative spelling.

ah! yes of course. Fortunately C2003 has the cross-ref. So just out of curiosity if one was planning to submit a solution to this puzzle (which I’m not) what would you put in the grid — the two clashing letters presumably?